“Can your career hurt your kids?” asks the cover of Fortune magazine (Mary 20) in its after-the-fact look at the relationship between day-care children and their dual career parents.
Writer Kenneth Labich’s series of “Yes, but…” arguments raises serious concerns about lonely children, family stress, a lack of shared time and its effect on children.
Non-parental day care
Perhaps the most costly social experiment of this century, non-parental day-care has been promoted as an adequate, or even superior substitute for the stay-at-home-mother. Since the late eighties, Canadian day-care advocates have called upon the federal government to create a day-care space for every child in the nation. Doing so would put Canada on the same track as Sweden, Denmark and the Soviet Union.
Child neglect
All three nations are experiencing the consequences that years of child neglect have brought. In Moscow, Albert Likhanov heads the newly created Soviet Children’s Foundation. He has called for a re-birth of “the cult of the family” and is convinced that children must be “one of the highest priorities in the life of our society.” Mr. Likhanov admits that Soviet society has committed a major blunder by making the state primarily responsible for children and giving higher priority to work than to motherhood.
Malaise
North American child care experts and educators have discovered a malaise in the day-care generation that gives rise to emotional and behavioral problems rarely found in their home-raised peers. Interviews by Fortune, Chicago social worker Alice White describes that malaise: “I’m seeing a lot more emptiness, a lack of ability to attach, no sense of real pleasure. I’m not sure a lot of these kids are going to be effective adults.”
Day-care alone, however, cannot be held accountable for a rise in violent behaviour, crime and suicide among juveniles.
Divorce robs children of at least one full-time parent. Hamilton public school principal Carl Burnell is seeing fewer families from traditional two-parent families. Even when the home is intact, Mom is often too tired at the end of her work day to be much of a mother. Children are often isolated from stressed and hurried parents.
Says Burnell: “I’m seeing children from families where both Mom and Dad have to be part of the workforce to keep themselves above the poverty line.”
Two income families
Must two-income families trade full-time parenting for the comfort or security of an extra income? If the current recession has taught us anything, Canadians have learned that job security and company loyalty are a thing of the past.
Psychiatric social worker and Family Forum president Lynne Scime sees rampant materialism as the main factor in promoting a work-out-side-the-home mindset: “Our problem is we shove our materialism onto our kids and they expect the trip to Florida, summer camp, a new bike…[and] parents have bought into it.”
If the challenge of the seventies was keeping kids off drugs, then the test for families in the nineties must be spending time together. How do parents and children cope with the growing demands made on them?
The response by conservative activists is simple: mothers ought to stay at home and tend to the needs of their families. For an increasing number of women, working at home or working part-time is their answer to the career rat-race.
Pat Bryson
Early childhood educator Pat Bryson of Hamilton made the decision to raise her three children at home after working several years in a formal day-care center. From those pre-parenthood days, Mrs. Bryson recalled her difficulty in understanding a day-care mom who permitted her tow-year-old to use a soother. “Daycare is a lot different from a parent’s point of view than it is from a teacher’s,” said Bryson. “When you become a parent, the perspective is totally different. I don’t know how my (own) kids would have survived in daycare. They had little habits…that were OK (at home) but not really for a daycare situation. I felt more comfortable with them being home here with me.”
With the support of husband Dennis, Mrs. Bryson continues her professional work at home, caring for other children as well as her own. She runs a registered home daycare, taking the children for field trips and providing a structured program for a small group of children.
Like most families, the Brysons find that the stress of life on the treadmill catches up on the weekend. “It really doesn’t seem like much of a weekend when you’ve got so many things to squeeze in. Sometimes (you) just have to sit down and do nothing…slow yourself down because you’re whacked out from doing so much.”
Carl Burnell agrees, saying, “There’s a lot more pressure on parents today, more pressure on them to be all things to all people, they’ve got an employer to please, they’ve got their children to please, they have each other to please and I think that tells a little bit on relationships. They have to work a little harder in making relationships work.”
The idiot box
Often, it is easier to park in front of the television than make the effort to communicate with the family at the end of a long day.
Television does ore than simply entertain. “The idiot box,” says Lynne Scime, “is a great hindrance to someone’s ability to sit and meditate, not necessarily in a religious sense but in a personal sense. What do you think about certain issues? Most people can’t tell you. They’ll tell you what they read in the paper, but they really can’t tell you what they, themselves, think because they’ve never thought about it.
Fallout
If television has mesmerized adults, what of its effect on children? Carl Burnell has seen the fallout from the 30-second video generation in his own students. Without realizing it, today’s Nintendo crowd’ are more reluctant readers….not as keen on delving into the printed word, they’re more attuned to letting someone else (for example, television) do their work for them.”
The day-care generation now reaching their twenties, is unique in many ways. They are the first generation raised in the electronic age of television and computer entertainment. Many have been raised by single parents since easy divorce laws were enacted.
How do these children compare to the Baby Boomers before them?
“In the last 20 years, I’ve seen quite a change in all the boys and girls who come to us, (in their_ state of preparedness,” says Principal Burnell. As children spend more and more time with their ‘electronic babysitter,’ the focus is much more on the visual. In school, they are much more able to ‘tune out’ the verbal that’s going on around them. The direction they receive from teachers can fall, more so than it did in the past, on deaf ears. A lot of them are much more difficult to tune in and to focus for a period of time.”
“Chunking” curriculum
In an effort to break through the reduced attention span, teachers resort to “chunking” the curriculum – teaching small segments at a time – in Sesame Street fashion – to increase mental absorption.
Inappropriate classroom behaviour is also on the rise, making if difficult for students to concentrate on their work. Asked why this was so, Lynne Scime discussed how society values children: “They’re not made to feel loved. A lot is expected of kids today in terms of (academic) excellence. We don’t appreciate that each child is different and we don’t value the difference. Children become possessions in which they’re an extension of the parent.”
The inability to empathize also concerns both Mrs. Scime and Carl Burnell. Recent news reports tell the story of an eleven-year-old boy who shot a woman walking by his house, simply to experience the feeling of shooting someone. Mrs. Scime comments that similar events are becoming more frequent.
However, there is hope for the future. Principal Burnell offers one piece of advice to parents: “Get involved and stay involved.” Typically, as the child becomes older and older the parents become less involved with the school. By the time the child reaches middle school, the parents become less and less involved with his/her life. It’s important to be involved not only with the school, says Burnell, but also with their daily life…who their friends are, where they’re going, questions of who, why, what, where, how…as a guide to what they’re doing.”
“We have to convey to mothers,” offers Lynne Scime, “that they are the best educators for their children. Mothers lack confidence and this is why a lot of them don’t stay home. They buy into the professionalism (that everything has to be handled by a professional, whether a teacher or social worker). We allow these people to tell us what’s best for our child and I don’t think they always know.”
And what of Pat Bryson? When asked whether she would recommend daycare when daughter Jessica becomes a mother, she readily offered her services as a babysitting grandmother. If young Jessica is wise, she’ll save this article, dust if off in twenty years and use it as an I.O.U.!
